Search

Current epidemiological changes promote a trend toward distributed care provision in the community. Digital platforms allowing the exchange of patient information are essential in optimizing community care. However, these digital platforms should present trustworthy environments. This article reports a study aiming to implement and evaluate a Logging Service based on blockchain technologies to guarantee the integrity of the activity logs of the Social Cooperation for Integrated Assisted Living platform. This platform of services was developed to support integrated care and assistance of community-dwelling older adults and uses the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources to promote information interoperability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a consequence of the epidemiological transition towards non-communicable diseases, integrated care approaches are required, not solely focused on medical purposes, but also on a range of essential activities for the maintenance of the individuals' quality of life. In order to allow the exchange of information, these integrated approaches might be supported by digital platforms, which need to provide trustful environments and to guarantee the integrity of the information exchanged. Therefore, together with mechanisms such as authentication, logging or auditing, the definition of access control policies assumes a paramount importance. This article focuses on the development of a parser as a component of a platform to support the care of community-dwelling older adults, the SOCIAL platform, to allow the definition of access control policies and rules using natural languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Large-scale distributed computing environments provide a vast amount of heterogeneous computing resources from different sources for resource sharing and distributed computing. Discovering appropriate resources in such environments is a challenge which involves several different subjects. In this paper, we provide an investigation on the current state of resource discovery protocols, mechanisms, and platforms for large-scale distributed environments, focusing on the design aspects. We classify all related aspects, general steps, and requirements to construct a novel resource discovery solution in three categories consisting of structures, methods, and issues. Accordingly, we review the literature, analyzing various aspects for each category. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The architecture design of peta-scale computing systems is complex and presents lots of difficulties to designs, as current tools lack support for relevant features of future scenarios. Novel systems must be designed with great care and tools, such as manycore architecture simulators, must be adapted accordingly. However, current simulation tools are very slow, often specific-purpose-oriented, suffer from various issues and are rarely able to simulate thousands of cores. The emergence of peta-scale systems and the upcoming manycore era brings nevertheless new challenges to computing systems and architectures, adding further difficulties and requirements on the development of the corresponding simulators. Furthermore, the design of architecture simulators for manycore systems involve methods and techniques from various interdisciplinary research areas, which in turn brings more challenges in different aspects. As system complexity grows, the growth of the simulation capacity is being outpaced (reaching the so called simulation wall). In this paper, we present the challenges for simulating future large scale manycore environments, and we investigate the adequacy of current modeling and simulation tools, methodologies and techniques. The aim of this work is to highlight how current approaches can best deal with the identified problems, smoothing the challenges of research in future peta-scale systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A common issue that occurs after conducting usability tests is how to prioritize issues for the next design iteration, that is, which should enter production first. It is also necessary to prioritize these issues in an easy-to-understand manner for internal stakeholders and in accordance with their criticality. With these two goals in mind, we propose an analysis framework with data visualization schemes to help UI/UX research teams analyze and present data from usability tests. This framework visually indicates the most problematic interaction areas. Ranked in a four-level user experience criticality scale of a digital product or prototype, the framework highlights functionalities that require improvements. To exemplify the innovative issues of this framework, we also applied it to a proof-of-concept prototype: a Unified Communications & Collaboration (UC&C) scheduling system. We had 27 participants test the prototype. The usability test proved to be particularly valuable when it came to validating the framework. This framework has enabled us to identify the most critical interaction and graphical interface problems of the prototype that need attention before the next design iteration. Overall, our results highlight the framework's innovative nature and relevance for companies or organizations concerned with the efficiency of their development process. The proposed method would enable them to make an augmented analysis and also help to optimize iterative design cycles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes an experimental evaluation of a multiservice ad hoc network, aimed to be interconnected with an infrastructure, operator-managed network. This network supports the efficient delivery of services, unicast and multicast, legacy and multimedia, to users connected in the ad hoc network. It contains the following functionalities: routing and delivery of unicast and multicast services; distributed QoS mechanisms to support service differentiation and resource control responsive to node mobility; security, charging, and rewarding mechanisms to ensure the correct behaviour of the users in the ad hoc network. This paper experimentally evaluates the performance of multiple mechanisms, and the influence and performance penalty introduced in the network, with the incremental inclusion of new functionalities. The performance results obtained in the different real scenarios may question the real usage of ad-hoc networks for more than a minimal number of hops with such a large number of functionalities deployed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Radio astronomy and Space Infrastructures in the Azores have a great scientific and industrial interest because they benefit from a unique geographical location in the middle of the North Atlantic allowing a vast improvement in the sky coverage. This fact obviously has a very high added value for: i) the establishment of space tracking and communications networks for the emergent global small satellite fleets ii) it is invaluable to connect the radio astronomy infrastructure networks in Africa, Europe and America continents using Very Large Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) techniques, iii) it allows excellent potential for monitoring space debris and Near Earth Objects (NEOs). There is in S. Miguel island a 32-metre SATCOM antenna that could be integrated in advanced VLBI networks and be capable of additional Deep Space Network ground support. This paper explores the space science opportunities offered by the upgrade of the S. Miguel 32-metre SATCOM antenna into a world-class infrastructure for radio astronomy and space exploration: it would enable a Deep Space Network mode and would constitute a key space facility for data production, promoting local digital infrastructure investments and the testing of cutting-edge information technologies. Its Atlantic location also enables improvements in angular resolution, provides many baselines in East–West and North–South directions connecting the emergent VLBI stations in America to Europe and Africa VLBI arrays therefore contributing for greater array imaging capabilities especially for sources or well studied fields close to or below the celestial equator, where ESO facilities, ALMA, SKA and its precursors do or will operate and observe in the coming decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Physical activity contributes to the maintenance of health conditions and functioning. However, the percentage of older adults who comply with the recommendations for physical activity levels is low when compared to the same percentages on younger groups. The SmartWalk system aims to encourage older adults to perform physical activity (i.e., walking in the city), which is monitored and adjusted by healthcare providers for best results. The study reported in this article focused on the implementation of SmartWalk security services to keep personal data safe during communications and while at rest, which were validated considering a comprehensive use case. The security framework offers various mechanisms, including an authentication system that was designed to complement the pairs of usernames and passwords with trusted execution environments and token-based features, authorization with different access levels, symmetric and asymmetric key cryptography, critical transactions review, and logging supported by blockchain technology. The resulting implementation contributes for a common understanding of the security features of trustful smart cities' applications, which conforms with existing legislation and regulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

IoT platforms have become quite complex from a technical viewpoint, becoming the cornerstone for information sharing, storing, and indexing given the unprecedented scale of smart services being available by massive deployments of a large set of data-enabled devices. These platforms rely on structured formats that exploit standard technologies to deal with the gathered data, thus creating the need for carefully designed customised systems that can handle thousands of heterogeneous data sensors/actuators, multiple processing frameworks, and storage solutions. We present the SCoT2.0 platform, a generic-purpose IoT Platform that can acquire, process, and visualise data using methods adequate for both real-time processing and long-term Machine Learning (ML)-based analysis. Our goal is to develop a large-scale system that can be applied to multiple real-world scenarios and is potentially deployable on private clouds for multiple verticals. Our approach relies on extensive service containerisation, and we present the different design choices, technical challenges, and solutions found while building our own IoT platform. We validate this platform supporting two very distinct IoT projects (750 physical devices), and we analyse scaling issues within the platform components. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on how Forth Generation (4G) technologies can improve the community through Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN). It is argued that the next-generation 4G networks is neighborhood WMN, it reflects the trade-off between the immediate self-interest of the user as well as the user's need for social contacts. WMN encourage users to participate, enable trustworthy network creation, and provide cooperation. It is mentioned that forming a neighborhood wireless network depend on the expansion wired Internet.

In recent years the Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) Task Group (TG) has been working on proposing a series of standards to provide Ethernet with hard real-time guarantees, online management of the traffic and fault tolerance mechanisms. In this way the TG expects to create the network technology of future novel applications with real-time and reliability requirements. TSN proposes using spatial redundancy to increase the reliability of Ethernet networks, but using spatial redundancy to tolerate temporary faults is not a cost-effective solution. For this reason, we propose to use time redundancy to tolerate temporary faults in the links of TSN-based networks. Specifically, we have proposed the Proactive Transmission of Replicated Frames (PTRF) mechanism, which consists in transmitting several copies of each frame in a preventive manner. In this article we present for the first time a detailed description of the mechanism, with the three different approaches we have designed. We also present the implementation of PTRF in a real TSN prototype. Furthermore, we carry out a qualitative comparison of the different approaches of the mechanism and we experimentally evaluate the approaches of the mechanism in a quantitative manner from three perspectives: the end-to-end delay, the jitter and the bandwidth consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Heating appliances consume approximately 48 % of the energy spent on household appliances every year. Furthermore, a malfunctioning device can increase the cost even further. Thus, there is a need to create methods that can identify the equipment's malfunctions and eventual failures before they occur. This is only possible with a combination of data acquisition, analysis and prediction/forecast. This paper presents an infrastructure that supports the previously mentioned capabilities and was deployed for failure detection in boilers, making possible to forecast faults and errors. We also present our initial predictive maintenance models based on the collected data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]